Comment: Is it true that London 2012 is the first games where every
participating country has sent both male and female competitors? I can't
vouch for other media sources, but I've included some examples from one
British newspaper/website:

"This is the first Olympics where every competing nation has sent women
and the first where women have competed in every sport, even if the Saudi
Arabian runner Sarah Attar had to run 800m in a hijab."

"The president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, has
hailed the fact that all 204 competing nations have sent male and female
athletes to the Games for the first time, with Saudi Arabia the last to do
so."

"These were a good Olympics for sporting ethos too. London 2012's greatest
milestone was the equality, and in some respects the superiority, of
women's participation. No national team was male-only, for the first
time."

In fact, according to the data that the Guardian published online, and in
the Olympics supplement on 30/07/12, two countries - Barbados and Nauru -
sent no female competitors

2 - Is it all Jacques Rogge's fault? Should he have checked first? Should
journalists have taken him at his word?

3 - Is it possible that any or all of the journalists (and/or Jacques
Rogge) - for reasons best known to themselves - overlooked the inaccuracy
of their claim regarding women's participation for a bigger story about
equality? (i.e. Is there an echo of the domestic violence/Superbowl story
here?)

Comment: Is it true that London 2012 is the first games where every
participating country has sent both male and female competitors? ...

Quote:

...Questions

1 - Where's the evidence, if any, for such a claim?

2 - Is it all Jacques Rogge's fault? Should he have checked first? Should
journalists have taken him at his word?

The BBC's website lists also team members for each participating country. So if you wanted to, you could go through each country and find out which countries sent athletes of which gender. It confirms the Guardianinformation about Barbados and Nauru.

I don't know if it's Jacques Rogge's fault.

Quote:

3 - Is it possible that any or all of the journalists (and/or Jacques
Rogge) - for reasons best known to themselves - overlooked the inaccuracy
of their claim regarding women's participation for a bigger story about
equality? (i.e. Is there an echo of the domestic violence/Superbowl story
here?)

I think it's entirely likely. The meat of the story was the participation of female athletes from Saudi Arabia, who had previously been barred entirely by their own country from competing in public. There is, AFAIK, no bar on female competitors from Barbados or Nauru (and no bar on male competitors from Bhutan for that matter).

The statements made by some of the articles linked about this being the first time that women have competed in "every sport" is also worth comment: there was no women's canoe slalom event (although there was a single kayak event). There are also AFAIK no men in the synchronised swimming or rhythmic gymnastics events (although I suppose these examples could be said to be disciplines within a sport).

I don't know what the "domestic violence/Superbowl story" is, or how it might relate to a story about gender representation in Olympic competition.

I don't know what the "domestic violence/Superbowl story" is, or how it might relate to a story about gender representation in Olympic competition.

The domestic violence/Superbowl story is a UL that cases of domestic violence go up during the Superbowl because so many more men are drinking and abusing their wives. The writer's theory is that the story gets repeated as a way to get more attention paid to domestic violence by linking it with an event that gets tons of media attention and the "all women" story got repeated in order to draw attention to the progress that women are making by linking it with an event that gets tons of media attention.

I didn't check all those articles, but the slant that was given to me when I commented on countries such as Suadi Arabia sending female athletes for the first time was that they were told they HAD to have female athletes or they couldn't compete. So that's going around as well, at least locally.
I actually doubted that, since athletes take years to become skilled in a sport and one of these female athletes was the flag bearer (somewhere like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, I don't recall)